Lives Of African American Women Research Articles

Walker’s The Color Purple: Portrayal of Celie’s Struggle from Servitude to Sovereignty

This paper attempts to explore Celie’s struggle for independence in a male dominated African American society as depicted in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Focusing on the lives of African-American women in the Southern United states during 1930s, it unfolds the events of black male brutality towards black women. It exposes the ways that the central character, Celie, pursues, when she proceeds to her long journey to freedom. Celie passes through a difficult path of racial/patriarchal oppression before she gets sovereignty. She accepts the solidarity of the female community to accomplish her quest for identity. Applying textual inquiry approach, the present paper highlights the role of deep female relationships in the life of Celie, a poor black girl. Celie becomes stronger when she gets support from other women, which helps her to emancipate herself from the evils of patriarchy and sexism. Celie’s freedom goes through physical, then spiritual, and finally economic phases, specifically, when she establishes her own business. Narrating the accounts of under privileged black community, Walker clarifies that ‘womanism’ is the only medium that helps to liberate inconspicuous southern black women from patriarchy and structural racism and sexism. The harsh circumstances are the key factors which make African American community captive and black women’s lives miserable.

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Black Women and Historical Wellness

Black Women and Historical Wellness Kimberly Akano (bio) Stephanie Evans's Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021 Amid individual, interpersonal, and sociopolitical stressors, what resources have Black women leveraged to care for themselves and their communities? For some like Harriet Jacobs or Angela Davis, stretching served as a lifeline for dealing with physical confinement during periods of enslavement or imprisonment. For Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, writing and mindfulness nurtured their intellectual health while navigating challenging academic institutions. Still, others such as Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner found comfort while moving their bodies to accomplish daily household chores—out of view from the public eye that typically followed them. For all of these women, such strategies formed the building blocks of robust practices that aligned the mind, body, and spirit. These women and many others are part of a larger tradition of Black women's embodied efforts to pursue health and healing. In Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, historian Stephanie Evans traces an expansive history of Black women's ideas surrounding mental health and physical well-being as they navigate stress and trauma in their everyday lives. This history decenters an emphasis on South Asian and white American iterations of yoga to shed light on African and African American contributions to yoga history—what she ultimately calls "Africana yoga" (365). By adopting a capacious understanding of yoga to include prayer, exercise, and meditation practices, Evans argues that African American women's pursuit of wellness is anything but new. Instead, Black women's healing traditions reflect an enduring legacy of "historical wellness," the sustained ways of being and knowing that Black women apply to prioritize individual and communal health (364). For Evans, a [End Page 329] historical wellness approach to Black women's understandings of wellness requires situating their healing traditions within the larger context of Black women's struggles against racism, sexual violence, and the many other challenges that threaten African American women's flourishing. In doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga. This approach also seeks to consider how the experiences and epistemological contributions of Black women "show us inner peace is possible, historical, practical, and teachable" (136). As a work of intellectual history, Evans attends to a selection of Black women's memoirs and autobiographies to analyze how African American women have narrated their stress management strategies over time. In particular, she focuses on the writings of Black women senior elders (those age seventy and above) and Black women midlife elders (those age fifty and above). Evans situates these writings before and after 1975 when the first issue of Yoga Journal, a national publication, gained national attention. Using her method of "narrative portraiture," Evans artfully weaves biographical data with historical analysis to provide robust depictions of African American women's lives (43). These portraits offer an intimate look at subjective experiences of loss, trauma, and healing. They also suggest that past and present socio-political developments such as enslavement, the Great Migration, and the #MeToo movement required African American women to assess and refashion their varied approaches to health over time. For example, Evans gestures toward an increasing need for Black women to reconsider how nuanced understandings of wellness may positively contribute to more contemporary conversations about social media usage, classroom pedagogy, and public health policy. Indeed, rather than settling for one-dimensional portrayals of Black women that overemphasize life's trials or triumphs, Evans considers the "beautiful, ugly, and healing" moments that inform the dynamism of African American women's wellness writings (36). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Evans ultimately calls "Africana yoga" involves Rosa Parks's dedicated yoga practice, which, in part, sustained her lifelong commitment to activism. Evans's keen analysis of Rosa Parks's engagement with yoga stands as an apt illustration of one of her primary assertions that "it is political for Black women to claim ownership or possession, of their own bodies" (47). In other words, Black...

Black Women’s Psychiatric Incarceration at Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century

During the nineteenth century, thousands of Black women were treated in state mental asylums throughout the US South. However, their unique experiences have been neglected in the history of psychiatry. This article considers the lives of African American women who were sent to the infamous Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that post-slavery psychiatric practices worked in tandem with a myriad of postbellum social realities, including cultural constructions of Black femininity, poverty, intimate-partner violence, and racism, to distinguish Black women’s experiences of “insanity” and psychiatric incarceration from those of their white female counterparts and white and Black men. The psychiatric discourses developed to manage nineteenth-century Black women’s minds and bodies set the stage for their experiences of mental disability and treatment for generations to come.

Resistance against Women’s Objectification Portrayed in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the early twentieth century, African-American women in the southern United States faced double oppression as a result of patriarchy and racism. They strive to reclaim their independence, all the more so when they are bound by their marriage. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Zora Neale Hurston's magnum opus, which chronicles the objectification of a young African-American woman called Janie Crawford during her marriage. Through the lens of Black Feminism, this research aims to identify the many forms of female objectification present in the novel and to ascertain the responses taken by the main character in response to the objectification. This research makes use of Martha Nussbaum's and Rae Langton's objectification ideas. Additionally, this study employs Kumea Shorter-Gooden's resistance strategies to evaluate the main character's strategies for resisting objectification. Janie Crawford was subjected to nine distinct forms of objectification by both her first and second husbands, Logan and Jody, according to this study. Additionally, this research illustrates how Janie Crawford's opposition to objectification is fueled by the concept of self-definition. In general, the findings indicate that the novel is centered on the problem of women's objectification and is a timely representation of African American women's lives in the early twentieth century.

The intersection of religion and mental well-being amongst African-American women

ABSTRACT A qualitative research study was conducted to understand the meaning of religion in the lives of African-American women and how it connected to their mental well-being. Stories of women in their day-to-day lives are examined using a phenomenological methodology to determine the ways in which women sought help and whether religion was a benefit to their lives. The findings established that there were diverse interpretations and methods of viewing the term religion and mental well-being. Each person had their own appraisal of what these terms meant, and how they affected them. An unexpected finding of the research was the significance of eastern meditation and Buddhist practice with women who were part of conservative Black faith communities that discouraged such practice.

‘A thought of home’ memorialising slavery and narrativising war in Horace Pippin’s paintings

ABSTRACTThis article investigates twentieth-century African American artist and World War I combat veteran, Horace Pippin’s multifaceted yet under-examined narrative paintings. Coming to grips with his self-reflexive artistic strategies and his experimental practice in which he does justice to the pain of daily ‘suffering’ in a search for the spiritual peace promised by a beautiful ‘sunset,’ this article examines the thematic and formal difficulties embedded in his determination to represent the ‘everyday’ lives of African American women, children, and men as liberated from a white supremacist US national context. Across his works, he bears witness to untold generations of black strategies of resistance in the face of traumatic suffering not by emphasising the exceptional atypicality but rather the ‘everydayness’ of chattel slavery as a historical institution and of World War I as a modern European phenomenon. The overall purpose of this article is to challenge the existing criteria within which we define Pippin’s body of work – as repeatedly demarcated according to seemingly clear-cut categorisations as related either to World War I, slavery, history, religion or domesticity – in order to do justice to his lifelong conviction regarding ‘My life story of art, that is my art, and no one else.’

Spirituality and Well-Being in the Daily Lives of African American Women

Abstract Date Presented 04/04/19 The practice of spirituality is believed to be an essential and powerful force in the lives of African American women. Missing from the story of African American female spirituality is a deep understanding of the way that spirituality manifests in daily practices and the corresponding contribution to well-being. This qualitative research reveals the way in which spiritual experience, through the examination of the dynamics between decisions and actions, relates to a perception of well-being. Primary Author and Speaker: Clarissa Saunders-Newton

Shedding Light on Colorism: How the Colonial Fabrication of Colorism Impacts the Lives of African American Women

It is fascinating that the phenomenon of colorism, with such large scale and profound individual impact, can remain in the infancy of sociological study. Some African Americans insist that delving into the issue of colorism is a “distraction” and that we cannot overcome internalized racism until we defeat outward racism. I maintain that the battles are the same, and the impacts of both must be analyzed, but colorism—the lesser understood—requires its own attention. Colorism, notably among women, cannot begin to be resolved until both marginalized and non-marginalized people fully understand its creation leading to its current impact. Various papers and novels written with both the academic background and research and lived perspective as a dark-skinned black woman will be consulted. The research paper will move from the analysis of the historical context of colonialism and colorism against dark-skinned black women to unpacking colorisms many impacts and implications derived from this colonial construction to its effects within personal, private life. Thus, in my research paper, I will investigate how the colonial legacy of colorism impacts the lives of African American woman in the present day.

Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance

“I don't read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations,” proclaimed Sojourner Truth in her war against the arts of reading and writing as sites of white supremacist power that dehumanized and made invisible the lives of African American women, children, and men (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols., 1881–1922, vol. II, p. 927). Mindful of how her oratory and language were distorted in print, Truth maintained a lifelong determination “to be reported in a grammatical and smooth way, ‘not as if I was saying tickety-ump-ump-nicky-nacky’” (ibid.). Categorical in her rejection of textual misrepresentations of her speeches and songs that were beyond her control, Truth turned not only to narrative production by working with white female editors she trusted and respected—including Olive Gilbert and Frances W. Titus—but also to photographic portraiture. If the collaborative research undertaken by Zoe Trodd, John Stauffer, and myself for Picturing Frederick Douglass (2015) establishes Frederick Douglass's pioneering status as the most photographed black or white U.S. male of the nineteenth century, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's wonderfully original and powerfully compelling Enduring Truths confirms Truth's status as the radically innovative black female experimenter of the genre.

No Longer Invisible: Understanding the Psychosocial Impact of Skin Color Stratification in the Lives of African American Women

This article examines how skin color stratification, termed "colorism," affects the psychological well-being of African American women. Previous research has shown that the experience of colorism is pervasive within the black community and that black women have been culturally or personally affected by intraracial discrimination. This article describes a qualitative study that used focus groups to investigate the experiences of black women that were categorized according to their self-ascribed skin tone group. The findings indicated that women of different hues have distinctive experiences based on their skin tone, and that these experiences influence how they felt about themselves and interact with others. The article concludes with a discussion of practice, research, and policy implications.

Revealing a hidden curriculum of Black women’s erasure in sexual violence prevention policy

ABSTRACTThis article aims to challenge the framework by which rape and sexual assault prevention in higher education are being constituted by centring Black women’s experiences of sexual violence within a prevention and response policy framework. Numerous research studies exist in the literature regarding the specific experience of sexual violence for Black women within a national context that remains deeply committed to White supremacy [Buchanan, N. T., and A. J. Ormerod. 2002. “Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American Women.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 107–124; Crenshaw, K. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167; Donovan, R., and M. Williams. 2002. “Living at the Intersection: The Effects of Racism and Sexism on Black Rape Survivors.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 95–105; McNair, L. D., and H. A. Neville. 1996. “African American Women Survivors of Sexual Assault: The Intersection of Race and Class.” Women & Therapy 18 (3/4): 107–118; Omolade, B. 1989. “Black Women, Black men, and Tawana Brawley – The Shared Condition.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 12: 11–23; West, C. 2002. “Battered, Black, and Blue: An Overview of Violence in the Lives of Black Women.” Women & Therapy 25 (3/4): 5–27]. Using the critical pedagogy principle of ‘hidden curriculum’ or how what is directly communicated through educational processes also conveys unstated values, judgments, and regulatory norms, the author analyses the first report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault [2014. Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault] for race-neutral language that contributes to the silencing of the sexual violence that Black college women experience. The necessity of race-conscious sexual assault policy is discussed.

Living With Maternal HIV: Spirituality, Depression, And Family Functioning

Risk factors such as depression and low SES often affect an HIV infected mother’s ability to function within her family. Spirituality may interact with such risk factors contributing to the resiliency of these mothers. The current study explored spirituality’s influence on the relationship between depression and perceptions of family functioning in African American women living with HIV. High levels of spirituality were associated with decreased psychological distress and spirituality served as a significant predictor of family cohesion. Findings from this study support the importance of spirituality in the lives of African American women living with HIV and their families.

Taste as Emotion: The Synesthetic Body in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him he was real nice ... His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them. --Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird My genius from a boy, Has like a bird within my heart; But could not thus confined her employ, Impatient to depart. --George Moses Horton, Moses Horton, Myself George Moses Horton, the self-described Colored Bard of North Carolina, was born into slavery in Northampton County, North Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century. Denied a formal education, Horton taught himself to read through the illicit study of cast-off schoolbooks and by listening in on the spelling lessons of local white children. As described in his eponymous poem, his genius fluttered from a young age, but a black man living in the Antebellum South, he was physically and emotionally confined by the laws and stereotypes of his time. The biological justification of Horton's captivity relied on a racialization of bodies that distinguished and categorized individuals along lines of subordination and domination. Rarely were the emotions of slaves considered, their temperament, like intelligence, was often regarded childlike, and therefore not capable of complexity or nuance. Horton's use of the feminine to portray the powers of his genius--his poetry--is telling, he, himself, relies on familiar tropes, writing of his poetic yearning, she like a restless bird, would spread her wing. As a racially marked subject, Horton divorces himself from the creative impulse, referring to his genius she, and endowing his poetry with associations of feminine, white beauty. In doing so, he draws attention to parallels between poetry and femininity that see them delicate and gentle, but also trapped and disenfranchised through these connotations. These characterizations also extend to emotions, where historical binaries categorizing the relationship of gender to reason have posited femininity with whiteness, and women squarely on the side of sentiment. (1) As 'leaky' subjects held sway by tides of tears and menstrual blood, white women, through their associations with emotion, have been devalued in comparison to stereotypically masculine traits of intellect and objectivity. The consequences of this structuring work alongside similar lines of mind-body dualism, privileging those emotions connected with knowledge and the faculties of the mind against passion, feelings, and other baser affective qualities associated with the physical body. With regards to race, this structuring mirrors the disturbing ease with which emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities in the case of racialized subjects, reinforcing the notion of race itself truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body (Ngai 573). Given white femininity's adherence to a code of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity--virtues believed to be inherent in feminine nature [...] African American women's lives and labors in the antebellum South contrasted sharply with this iconic womanhood (Harris-Perry 55). As a result, false notions of hypersexualized black femininity were created as a way of reconciling the forced public exposure and commoditization of black women's bodies with the Victorian ideals of women's modesty and fragility (Harris-Perry 55). Horton's notion of freedom and the use of the feminine pronoun in his poetry, then, draws attention to the ways in which race and gender, and the divisions within and between these identities, are not only sites where social hierarchies are enforced, but also where their similarities are made visible. …

Examining the associations of racism, sexism, and stressful life events on psychological distress among African-American women.

African-American women may be susceptible to stressful events and adverse health outcomes as a result of their distinct social location at the intersection of gender and race. Here, racism and sexism are examined concurrently using survey data from 204 African-American women residing in a southeastern U.S. urban city. Associations among racism, sexism, and stressful events across social roles and contexts (i.e., social network loss, motherhood and childbirth, employment and finances, personal illness and injury, and victimization) are investigated. Then, the relationships among these stressors on psychological distress are compared, and a moderation model is explored. Findings suggest that racism and sexism are a significant source of stress in the lives of African-American women and are correlated with one another and with other stressful events. Implications for future research and clinical considerations are discussed.

Faith, Beliefs, and “Not Claiming” Disease

In Brief Diabetes affects more African American (AA) women and disease outcomes are more severe than in other ethnic groups. Faith and beliefs often play a significant role in AA women's lives and management of disease. This study shares the experience of an African American, female, Methodist pastor who faced health, spiritual, and life challenges related to diabetes. Her narrative offers rich information to healthcare providers for improving caring practices. Specific implications for practice are offered to help patients deal with the challenges of diabetes self-management. Diabetes affects more African American women and outcomes are more severe than in other ethnic groups. An African American woman's experience with diabetes offers insights to improve care. Don't miss “Caring Suggestions to Help Patients With Challenges of Diabetes Self-Management.”

Save 100 Babies©: Engaging Communities for Just and Equitable Birth Outcomes Through Photovoice and Appreciative Inquiry

This paper presents a community engagement model designed to advance social justice and equity for African American birth outcomes through the combined techniques of Photovoice and Appreciative Inquiry. In response to the persistent racial disparities in birth outcomes, Save 100 Babies© was constructed as a 2-day summit where the emphasis was placed on individual and community assets rather than deficits. The engagement was designed to create a level of readiness among individuals working within and outside the field of Maternal and Child Health to envision strategies to attain equitable birth outcomes. The goal of the conference was to facilitate higher level consciousness by guiding the participants though a process aimed at articulating assets, possibilities and the potential for co-creating the desired futures where racial disparities in birth outcome are eliminated [corrected]. As the result of the guided discourse that began with photographs of the lives of African American women, participants articulated the strengths they detected from the pictures, their recommendations for multifaceted changes in policies and practices, and their individual and organizational commitments for a changed future. Since the summit, participants have indicated ways they have fulfilled their vows that include informing families and communities about pregnancy risks, working with youth programs, supporting fatherhood involvement in pregnancy and birth, and advancing case management that is more attuned to women's strengths. Save 100 Babies© is evolving into a network and clearinghouse for sharing and disseminating information and resources for collaboration.

African American Women's Sexuality

I would like to thank Joanne Meyerowitz for organizing and inviting me to participate in this roundtable and for giving me the opportunity to refl ect briefl y on the importance of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal work, Intimate Matters. Few works have infl uenced the development of a fi eld both in laying the groundwork for future scholarship and in shaping pedagogical practice as powerfully as Intimate Matters has done in the fi eld of the history of sexuality in the United States. It is hard to believe it has been twentyfi ve years since its initial publication— like many others I continue to use it in my history of sexuality courses and to turn to it as a touchstone in my ongoing eff orts to grapple with the sweep of America’s sexual past and present and the place of black sexuality and, in particular, the sexual lives of African American women within that history. I reached for this book early and oft en in my own work on black women’s sex work in turnofthecentury Chicago. Th e interpretive framework John and Estelle off er in Intimate Matters provided a backdrop against which the crucial role of black women’s sexual labor and the interracial and intraracial politics surrounding it became visible for me. It helped me to understand the central connection between black migration and sexual modernization in the early twentieth century. And it provided a lens through which to see and further probe the historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies played in defi ning citizenship in earlytwentiethcentury cities. Th e analytical frameworks that John and Estelle developed in Intimate Matters— the mapping of the transformation in the meaning of sexuality from its primary association with reproduction and the family to an association with individual sexual pleasure, the development of the concepts of civilized morality and sexual liberalism, and their steady focus on the ways that sexuality has simultaneously refl ected and served to maintain systems of class, gender, and racial oppressions within the United States— have provided the scaf-

HIV Prevention Using Films: HIV/AIDS Positive African American Women Respond through Interpersonal Relationships in <i>Life Support</i>

HIV/AIDS has had a profound effect on the African American community. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [1], in 2010, African American women accounted for more than 25% of new HIV cases among Blacks. This staggering statistic has sparked social campaigns, including films that aim to address or hinder the spread of HIV. The film Life Support focuses on the social issues that shape the lives of African American women with HIV/AIDS. This study analyzed the film using Black feminist thought as the conceptual framework for understanding the everyday experiences of the main character, Ana, related to contracting the disease, stigma, sexuality, support systems, and coping mechanisms. It shows that knowledge is an important tool for living and coping with the disease. Additionally, it explores the image of HIV/AIDS among African American women. The film’s themes include Ana as a change agent, Life Support conversations, and positive and negative relationships.

Sister Friends: A Reflection and Analysis of the Therapeutic Role of Sisterhood in African American Women's Lives

Research with ethnically diverse women has found that friendships can enhance women's health and mental wellbeing (Greif & Sharpe, 2010). Sister friends can be crucial in assisting African American women and women of ethnically diverse backgrounds to face, address, and overcome, major transitions including stress and traumatic stress. Through a reflection and analysis of the relationship with a sister friend, the author explores the strength and challenges of sister friendship as well as therapeutic value. Recommendations are provided for sisterhood as a clinical intervention as well as for women therapist's self care. A case study of an African American woman in need of mutual sister friends is summarized. This exploration is shared through a womanistic psychology.